It’s so peaceful and dark in Barbara Hughes’ neighborhood just south of Carefree Highway that three owls live there, and other wild critters regularly scamper through. But it’s peaceful only on the surface. A battle–so far a polite one–is being waged over whether bulldozers will move in. Hughes lives across…
Passionflies, Squid and Cherry wine New Times feasts on a banquet of local recordings It’s Arizona Music Conference and Showcase ’91 week in the Valley, so let’s celebrate local acts. In the spirit of the event–one designed to focus national attention on Arizona’s homegrown talent–we decided to feature the latest…
IT’S 3 A.M. Those damn sleeping pills just aren’t cutting it anymore. You stumble out of bed. Perhaps you light up a cigarette. Maybe you pop a brew or head for that pint of Haagen-Dazs. But no matter what else you do, you almost certainly turn on the tube. If…
There has been so much speculation surrounding the Arizona State University and Phoenix Cardinals football teams that I decided to see for myself. I drove over to Tempe to see the ASU-UCLA game hours before it was scheduled to start. It was a sunny day with temperatures in the 80s…
Feeling jittery about the recent rash of roller coaster mishaps at the Arizona State Fair? Uneasy riders may want to steer clear of the construction currently under way at the Golf N’ Stuff miniature golf course at Metrocenter. Now going up (so it can come down soon) is Phoenix’s first…
Money slips through his fingers like so much mercury. When the money belongs to a savings and loan, the loss is limited to its depositors–unless the loss is so enormous that the financial institution goes belly up and the taxpayers are left holding the bag. When the money belongs to…
IT POURED ON THE day of Patricia Willoughby’s funeral. Even if headlights weren’t traditional for the members of a processional, the extraordinary number of creeping cars that snaked behind the hearse on the way to the Mesa graveyard would have needed their headlights because of the curtains of rain. Heaven…
Bad things often happen to good journalists. Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and Juan Williams of the Washington Post played key roles during the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Clarence Thomas. Both, however, have come away from the event with their reputations under fire. This doesn’t really surprise me…
NORTH-CENTRAL PHOENIX is an area of stately trees and solid homes which is often imagined as the heart of the city. Its residents cultivate this identity to a degree unparalleled in newer parts of town: Historic districts quilt the area’s southern fringe, and North Central Avenue blooms with embellishments financed…
What’s it gonna be today? A stabbing, maybe? Or a bloody spat between crackheads and hookers in nearby University Park? These are the sorts of things Cindy Myers thinks about often when she arrives at the Phoenix Museum of History at 1001 West Van Buren. And the executive director of…
LATE SUNDAY NIGHT–Finally, it is over. In Washington, D.C., it is past 2 a.m. This is the hour for stealth; a perilous period when muggers rule the streets. It’s a time for the criminal class to prevail and congressional pay raises to be voted. The faces of the senators are…
Linda Lee Curtis grew up in Great Bend, Kansas, the daughter of an oil-field worker. She moved to Phoenix 11 years ago and settled in a simple clapboard house near the State Capitol. Since that time, she and her husband, Ron, have lived frugally–a 1967 Volkswagen is their transportation–and have…
On October 4, Governor Fife Symington’s official press secretary lied to New Times and the governor’s law firm released a misleading document to the newspaper in an apparent 11th-hour attempt to discredit federal reports that Symington in 1983 had violated banking law. Did Doug Cole, the Governor’s press secretary, deliberately…
OF THE 14 multimillion-dollar bond issues approved enthusiastically by Phoenix voters in 1988, the city’s $15 million proposal to preserve its architectural heritage was uniquely ambitious. Never before had the city even considered devoting such resources to historic preservation. No one familiar with Phoenix’s screwy sprawl would have believed the…
I went back out of curiosity. They were presenting this year’s Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University in New York City. It was the 75th-anniversary celebration of the Pulitzers, and they had actually taken the trouble to invite every previous winner to come to New York to attend both the ceremony…
Dr. Robert Tamis built his medical practice by making it easier for women to have babies. In the early 1960s, the Phoenix obstetrician was one of the first Arizona doctors to prescribe epidural anesthesia, a treatment that made his patients’ labor and delivery less painful. A decade later, he opened…
When the City of Phoenix put a private consultant in charge of its international-relations program, supporters of then-Mayor Terry Goddard hailed the injection of free-enterprise energy into sleepy old City Hall. But some folks who work closely with the city’s Office of Trade and Protocol claim the results fall more…
BIOSPHERE 2 GETS a lot of ink these days. The project has finally reached “closure.” A couple of weeks ago a handful of scientific-looking people sealed themselves inside a big greenhouse near Tucson. For two years, the story goes, they will live under the dome, drink their own recycled pee…
MARK HOLLANDER WAS on top of the world when he reported for his first day of work at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1989. The 24-year-old Hollander could hardly believe the senior lawyers’ plush offices, with window views of the White House and…
Alex Macias, at age 19 the youngest buff present, first got interested about two years ago. “I got tired of hearing stories that he was a killer,” said Macias. “Then you’d hear other stories about how sensitive he was. I decided to find out for myself.” Macias brought his girlfriend…
THE REMAINS OF Billy the Kid were assembled recently, for purposes of a postmortem. The Kid, a long-dead horse thief, gunman and ladies’ man, still can draw a crowd, and the remains, in this case, were not your typical forensic mess of gristle and bone, but the crowd itself, as…
THE REMAINS OF Billy the Kid were assembled recently, for purposes of a postmortem. The Kid, a long-dead horse thief, gunman and ladies’ man, still can draw a crowd, and the remains, in this case, were not your typical forensic mess of gristle and bone, but the crowd itself, as…
